THE LA RAZA CRIME TIDAL WAVE - “These figures do not attempt to allege that foreign
nationals in the country illegally commit more
crimes than other groups,” the report states. “It
simply identifies thousands of crimes that should
not have occurred and thousands of victims that
should not have been victimized because the
perpetrator should not be here.”
CHARLOTTE CUTHBERTSON

YOU WILL NOT HEAR OBAMA AND THE DEMS TALKING ABOUT THE STAGGERING MEXICAN CRIME TIDAL WAVE IN OUR BORDERS AS THEY PUSH TO LEGALIZE MEXICO'S LOOTING!ACCORDING TO CA ATTORNEY GEN KAMALA HARRIS, NEARLY HALF THE MURDERS IN CA ARE NOW BY MEXICAN GANGS.CA HAS THE LARGEST AND MOST EXPENSIVE PRISON IN THE NATION. HALF THE INMATES ARE MEXICANS.OF THE TOP 200 MOST WANTED CRIMINALS IN LA RAZA-OCCUPIED LOS ANGELES, MORE THAN 180 ARE ALWAYS MEXICANS. THE REST RUSSIAN AND ARMENIAN.LOS ANGELES IS THE MEX DRUG CARTELS GATEWAY TO THE AMERICAN WEST. THE MEX DRUG CARTELS NOW OPERATE IN MORE THAN 2,500 AMERICAN CITIES.VIVA LA RAZA SUPREMACY? THEN VOTE DEM TO PUT MORE ILLEGALS INTO OUR JOBS, WELFARE AND VOTING BOOTHS!

latimes.com/world/la-fg-mexico-post-chapo-20140225,0,1312988.story

latimes.com

MEXICO UNDER SIEGE

With 'El Chapo' gone, Mexicans brace for drug cartel turf war

Along with the fear of more violence, some worry about the economic fallout of the arrest of Joaquin Guzman, whose operation pumped billions into Sinaloa state.

By Richard Fausset and Tracy Wilkinson

7:38 PM PST, February 24, 2014

BADIRAGUATO, Mexico — Now that the Mexican government has nabbed the country's most-wanted drug lord, Fernando Antonio Robles is worried about the future.

Robles is a 16-year-old bricklayer's apprentice in the wild drug-producing municipality where Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman grew up. In this hardscrabble patch of mountainous Sinaloa state, more than 74% of the people live in poverty. And yet the tiny county seat is full of fine new, freshly painted houses.

Robles knows that many of them were built by El Chapo's men.

"A lot of people are going to be unemployed," Robles said while loitering with a friend on the handsome town square, "because a lot of people worked for him."

The arrest of Guzman on Saturday in the resort city of Mazatlan, a few hours' drive and a world away from Badiraguato, was greeted with delight by the Mexican government. President Enrique Peña Nieto is hoping to show the world that he can fight a better war on drugs by relying, as he said Monday, more on "the application of technology and information analysis" than the sheer military muscle deployed by his predecessor, Felipe Calderon.

But many Mexicans are less euphoric about the capture of Guzman. The drug business has long been a main driver of Sinaloa's economy. Here in the heart of El Chapo's worldwide empire, many see him as a sympathetic character whose operation pumped billions of dollars into the state.

"He's helped a lot of people," said Jesus Gonzalez, the caretaker of a famous chapel honoring Jesus Malverde, an unofficial "folk saint" for the poor — and for drug dealers. According to legend, Malverde, who died in the early 20th century, was, like Guzman, a bandit who spread his wealth around. Guzman "has given out a lot of money," said Gonzalez. "He's built many things."
The less controversial, but more widely held, opinion is that Guzman's fall could lead to bloody turf and succession battles while doing little to interrupt the broad market forces that define the worldwide drug market and Mexico's key role in it.

"The triumph of the Peña government in detaining El Chapo shouldn't be underestimated," Leo Zuckermann, a columnist for the Mexico City newspaper Excelsior, wrote Monday. "But the question that should interest us more is whether the arrest will help stop the violence in this country or not. I fear that the answer isn't promising. In fact, the opposite could happen — that is to say, that there will be an increase in homicides, kidnappings and extortion in the short run."

A power struggle may ensue within Guzman's Sinaloa cartel, especially if it is revealed that Ismael "El Mayo" Zambada, Guzman's top partner, gave him up — as some Mexicans suspect.

Such an internal war could disrupt the earning power of the men who commission those new houses in Badiraguato — and in the process hurt the economic prospects of workers like Robles.
But the Sinaloa cartel may also prove to be an exception to the rule. The largest of Mexico's drug cartels, it has long been considered one of the most sophisticated and well managed. Some close observers assume that Guzman and other leaders had worked out a succession plan as smooth as Apple's after the death of Steve Jobs. Guzman and Zambada worked together closely and are not likely to unleash their men against each other, these sources say.

The next generation is primed to pick up where El Chapo left off. Guzman's "childrenare poised to take over for him," said Ismael Bojorquez, editor of Culiacan's Riodoce newspaper who has studied the Sinaloa cartel extensively. Zambada and the other main Sinaloa cartel leader, Juan Jose Esparragoza, known as "El Azul," are firmly in control of their factions and do not need to seize Guzman's portion of the operation, Bojorquez said.

Peña Nieto's team expressed concern about the fragmentation of leaderless cartels soon after the new president took office in December 2012. Interior Minister Miguel Angel Osorio Chong said that the Calderon administration's "kingpin strategy" — focusing on the capture or slaying of the nation's top drug lords — resulted in smaller groups that were "more violent and much more dangerous," often branching out into extortion, kidnapping and robbery rackets.

Succession battles are also believed to have added to Mexico's recent violence. The killing of Arturo Beltran Leyva in Cuernavaca in December 2009, for instance, unleashed a bloody power struggle among his lieutenants.

Despite the new government's criticism of the strategy, however, few expected Peña Nieto to abandon it, particularly since that would mean rebuffing American security officials who often supply intelligence on the whereabouts of the capos. The United States' ability to track Guzman's satellite phone use was a key to his arrest.

The future of the cartel was the chief topic of debate Monday among residents of Culiacan, a city of 600,000 people.

The cartel's influence is all-pervasive here: A well-tended cross covered in balloons is displayed prominently in front of a busy shopping mall, commemorating the 2008 slaying of Guzman's son Edgar Guzman Lopez. The businesses in the mall are apparently too intimidated to argue with its presence. In the leafy town square, conversations with a stranger are often left to trail off when a speaker thinks a cartel spy might be nearby.

Taxi driver Jesus Luis Caldera, 36, predicted the cartel would weather the loss of Guzman. "It's going to be the same movie — only with different capos," said Caldera, who said he used to move cocaine for the cartel until he went to prison for it.

Armando Sanchez, 28, the manager of an electronics company from the state of Guanajuato, was playing curious tourist Sunday afternoon at the Malverde shrine. He worried that Guzman's death might give rival groups — particularly the bloodthirsty Zetas gang — a chance to muscle their way onto Sinaloa cartel territory.

"We're going to see a lot of fighting for control," he said.

Guzman may be locked away, but there is still anxiety that the vast machine that has protected him over the years remains intact. The Culiacan newspaper Noroeste reported Monday that it received threatening phone calls after it contacted Mazatlan's government offices to inquire about reports that municipal police there had been protecting El Chapo.

Guzman's 13 years of life on the run had its share of hardships: Mexican officials said he avoided arrest last week at a house in Culiacan by escaping through a series of underground drainage canals.
But he was also apparently intent on creating a semblance of a normal life. On Monday, Osorio Chong said that Guzman was with his wife, a former beauty queen named Emma Coronel, and the couple's young twin girls, when he was arrested. Osorio Chong said that the wife and children were not detained because "they had absolutely nothing to do with respect to the actions of the criminal."
In the mountain town of Badiraguato — about 50 miles north of Culiacan along a two-lane road controlled by heavily armed police checking up on who might want to visit there — Joaquin Guzman is still the local boy made good. A store selling pirated CDs was stocked with music singing his praises.

"They want to see him dead, but they can't," one tune declared. "The cartel is big, it's blowing up / I'm proud of Chapo Guzman."

As word of Guzman's arrest spread, many locals didn't buy it at first, preferring to believe it was a complicated ruse on the part of the Americans, said Pedro Perez, 45, a worker at an ice cream store.
Others, like Culiacan resident Rodolfo Albertos, 58, see no conspiracy. When it comes to the drug trade, he said, the forces that will continue to shape it are as clear as day — whether "El Chapo" is around or not.

"This isn't going to stop," Albertos said. "Not so long as there are consumers. As long as there are consumers, there's going to be business."

According to the report, the amount of heroin seized at the southern U.S. border increased 232% between 2008 and 2012 — apparently the result of greater Mexican heroin production and a growing incursion by Mexican traffickers into U.S. markets. It notes that the U.S. is experiencing a “sizable increase” in the number of new heroin users.

THE MEXICAN DRUG CARTELS ENDORSE BARACK OBAMA’S SABOTAGE of HOMELAND SECURITY TO BUILD THE LA RAZA DEM PARTY BASE of VOTING ILLEGALS, AND TO EASE EVEN MORE ILLEGALS INTO OUR JOBS TO KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED and PROFITS HIGH FOR HIS WALL STREET DONORS.

MOST OF THE FORTUNE 500 ARE GENEROUS DONORS TO THE MEXICAN FASCIST PARTY of LA RAZA “THE RACE” google it!

SABOTAGE OF AMERICAN BORDERS WITH NARCOMEX, SABOTAGE OF E-VERIFY TO EASE MORE ILLEGALS INTO OUR JOBS, NON-EXISTENT ENFORCEMENT OF LAWS PROHIBITING THE EMPLOYMENT OF ILLEGALS, BILLIONS IN WELFARE HANDED TO LA RAZA ILLEGALS, BILLIONS OF TAX FRAUD RETURNSHANDED TO LA RAZA, SABOTAGE OF AMERICA’S VOTING TO EASE MORE ILLEGALS WITHOUT NON-FRAUD IDENTITY INTO OUR VOTING BOOTHS, TWO LA RAZA SUPREMACIST SEC. OF LABOR, AND ONLY ADVOCATES OF OPEN BORDERS INHOMELAND SECURITY and AMERICAN TAX DOLLARS USED TO FUND THE MEXICAN FASCIST PARTY of LA RAZA “THE RACE”…. Is Obama sabotaging American sovereignty as he hispanders for the illegals’ votes???

“There’s widespread doubt that this administrationcan be trusted to enforce our laws, and it’s goingto be difficult to move any immigration legislationuntil that changes,” Boehner said in a preparedstatement opening his weekly press conference.

BUILDING THE LA RAZA (unregistered dems) MEXICAN WELFARE STATE OFF OUR BACKS…

OBAMA’S ENDLESS SABOTAGE OF AMERICAN HOMELAND SECURITY, BORDERS AND LAWS FOR THE INVADING MEXICANS!

The Homeland Security Department has granted legal status to 99.2 percent of all illegal immigrants who have applied under President Obama's new non-deportation policy for young adults, according to the latest numbers released Friday.

across the border and into a vast U.S.

distribution web in Los Angeles, DEA agents

were watching and listening.

Never lose track of the load.
It was drilled into everybody who worked for Carlos “Charlie” Cuevas. His drivers, lookouts, stash house operators, dispatchers -- they all knew. When a shipment was on the move, a pair of eyes had to move with it. Cuevas had just sent a crew of seven men to the border crossing at Calexico, Calif. The load they were tracking was cocaine, concealed in a custom-made compartment inside a blue 2003 Honda Accord.
The car was still on the Mexican side in a 10-lane crush of vehicles inching toward the U.S. Customs and Border Protection inspection station. Amputee beggars worked the queue, along with men in broad-brimmed hats peddling trinkets, tamales and churros.
A lookout watching from a car in a nearby lane reported on the load's progress. Cuevas, juggling cellphones, demanded constant updates. If something went wrong, his boss in Sinaloa, Mexico, would want answers.
The Accord reached the line of inspection booths, and a lookout on the U.S. side picked up the surveillance. He was Roberto Daniel Lopez, an Iraq War veteran, standing near the “Welcome to Calexico” sign.
It was the usual plan: After clearing customs, the driver would head for Los Angeles, shadowed by a third lookout waiting in a car on South Imperial Avenue.
But on this hot summer evening, things were not going according to plan. Lopez called his supervisor to report a complication: The Accord was being directed to a secondary inspection area for a closer look. Drug-sniffing dogs were circling.
Cuevas rarely talked directly to his lookouts or drivers. But after being briefed by the supervisor, he made an exception. He called Lopez.
“What's happening?” he asked.
“The dogs are going crazy,” Lopez replied.Dots on a map
Cuevas worked for the Sinaloa cartel, Mexico's most powerful organized crime group. He was in the transportation side of the business. Drugs were brought from Sinaloa state to Mexicali, Mexico, in bus tires. Cuevas' job was to move the goods across the border and deliver them to distributors in the Los Angeles area, about 200 miles away.
The flow was unceasing, and he employed about 40 drivers, lookouts and coordinators to keep pace.
The canines circling the load car that evening in August 2006 were the least of his problems. Eight agents from a Drug Enforcement Administration task force had converged on the border. Not even U.S. customs inspectors knew they were there. The agents had been following Cuevas and tapping his phones for months.

The canines circling the load car that evening in August 2006 were the least of his problems.

Because he was a key link between U.S. and Mexican drug distributors, his phone chatter was an intelligence gusher. Each call exposed another contact, whose phone was then tapped as well. The new contacts called other associates, leading to more taps. Soon the agents had sketched a vast, connect-the-dots map of the distribution network.
Its branches spanned the U.S. and were believed to lead back to Mexico's drug-trafficking heartland, to Victor Emilio Cazares, said to be a top lieutenant of Joaquin “Chapo” Guzman, the most wanted trafficker in the world. From his mansion outside Culiacan, Cazares allegedly oversaw the network of smugglers, distributors, truckers, pilots and stash house operators.
Other DEA investigations had targeted Mexican cartels, but this one, dubbed Operation Imperial Emperor, was providing the most complete picture of how drugs moved from Sinaloa to U.S. streets.
DEA officials were in no hurry to wrap it up. In fact, they were holding off on arrests so they could continue to study the supply chain and identify new suspects.
Imperial Emperor would eventually result in hundreds of arrests, the seizure of tens of millions of dollars in drugs and money, and the indictment of Cazares.
It would also reveal a disheartening truth: The cartel's U.S. distribution system was bigger and more resilient than anyone had imagined, a spider web connecting dozens of cities, constantly regenerating and expanding.The guy next door
As a U.S. Marine in Fallouja, Iraq, Lopez had dodged mortar fire, navigated roads mined with explosives and received a commendation for leadership. Back home in El Centro, he couldn't even get work reading meters for the local irrigation district.
But Lopez, who had two children to support, knew another industry was always hiring.
One of the Sinaloa cartel's main pipelines runs through the antiquated U.S. port of entry at Calexico, a favorite of smugglers. The inspection station sits almost directly on the border, without the usual buffer zone of several hundred feet, so inspectors have difficulty examining cars in the approach lanes. Drug-sniffing dogs wilt in summer heat that can reach 115 degrees.
California's southeastern corner, a region of desert dunes and agricultural fields with the highest unemployment rate in the state, offered fertile ground for cartel recruiting.
Smugglers were your next-door neighbor, the guy ringing you up at Wal-Mart, the big tipper at Applebee's, the old friend at your high school reunion.
Lopez was friends with a man named Sergio Kaiser, who had married into his family. Kaiser said he owned a body shop, but his tastes seemed too flamboyant for that. He was building a house with a grand staircase modeled on the mansion in the movie “Scarface.”
In reality, Kaiser was Cuevas' top lieutenant, and he told Lopez he could help him with his money troubles. There were several possibilities.
For a night's work driving a load car from Mexicali to Los Angeles, a driver shared $5,000 with his recruiter and got to keep the car.
Another entry-level position was as a lookout. One kind of lookout followed the load car from the stash house in Mexicali to the border. Another stood watch at the port of entry and reported when the car had cleared customs. Yet another tailed the load car up the freeway to Los Angeles.
Lopez accepted Kaiser's offer. Being a lookout was harmless, he figured: Just stand there and watch a car cross the border. “[He] didn't say it involved drugs, but I knew,” Lopez said. “I thought, 'What's the big deal?'“

When you think of drug cartels, you think violence, guns, killing. This guy was nothing like that.”

Tricks of the trade
Cuevas owned a large tract home in Calexico and drove a late-model BMW 323. A gold chain dangled from his thick neck. Married with two children, he enjoyed the cliched perks of a smuggler's life. He went through several mistresses, treating them to breast-enhancement surgeries and trips to Disneyland and San Francisco.
He would ride his pricey sand rail in the Baja California dunes, and he always picked up the tab at restaurants or on wild weekends across the border in Mexicali.
At Emmanuel's barber shop, Cuevas would jump the line to get his “fade” haircut, then pay for everybody else's trim. He took care of friends' hospital bills and lent people money, no strings attached.
“When you think of drug cartels, you think violence, guns, killing,” Lopez said in an interview. “This guy was nothing like that.”
He didn't carry weapons or surround himself with enforcers. Constantly juggling phones and buying packaging materials from Costco, he seemed more stressed out than intimidating. Cuevas had a stutter, and it worsened when his boss Cazares called from Sinaloa. He took antacids to calm an anxious stomach.
To get drugs across the border, he deployed a fleet of SUVs and cars with custom-made hidden compartments. He favored Volkswagen Jettas and Chevrolet Avalanches. Both were manufactured in Mexico, and the DEA believes cartel operatives were able to study the designs to identify voids where drugs could be concealed.
Cuevas sent the cars to a mechanic in Compton who outfitted the compartments with elaborate trapdoors. The jobs took two weeks and the mechanic charged as much as $6,500, but it was worth it. Only a complicated series of actions could spring the doors open.
One front-bumper nook could be accessed only by connecting a jumper cable from the positive battery post to the front screw of a headlight. The jolt of electricity would cause the license plate to fall off, revealing the trapdoor.
Cuevas picked his drivers with great care, rejecting people with visible tattoos or serious criminal records and sending those he hired on dry runs to test their nerves. He kept the Calexico border crossing under constant watch, focusing on the mobile X-ray machine that could see inside vehicles. It was used sparingly, and the moment inspectors drove it away, his crew went to work.
Over the years, his cars consistently eluded detection.
“I was great at it. I had never lost a car in the border,” Cuevas said. “Dogs never hit it or nothing.”
In mid-2006, however, he seemed to lose his touch.
In June, authorities had followed one of his drivers to Cudahy, near Los Angeles, and seized 163 pounds of cocaine from a stash house.
A month later, police outside El Centro stopped his best driver, a hot dog vendor from Mexicali, and found $799,000 in a hidden compartment.
Cuevas had to make the cartel whole, either in cash or by working the debt off by supervising shipments without receiving his cut. Hundreds of pounds of cocaine, meanwhile, continued to pour in every week from Sinaloa, and he was under intense pressure to keep the goods moving.
Now, on this August evening, a customs inspector had pulled his load car, the Accord, into the secondary inspection area.
“Dude, I think your guy got busted,” Lopez told Cuevas over the phone. “They've got him in handcuffs.”
Behind the dashboard and in a rear-quarter panel of the Honda, inspectors found 99 pounds of cocaine. The driver was arrested. Everybody else scattered. Lopez drove home, unconcerned. He had spent only 15 minutes at the border crossing and never got near the drugs.
Cuevas ordered his crew to dump their cellphones, in case anyone had been listening in. At the DEA's bunker-like surveillance post in nearby Imperial, the wiretap chatter went silent.
DEA agents had not expected a bust and were not happy about it. The agents had planned to let the driver cross the border and then follow him to his Los Angeles connection. Now they would have to regroup.

Waiting in the dark
Two days later, the agents sat in a van down the street from Cuevas' two-story home in Calexico, waiting for the lights to dim. Cuevas' neighbors in the subdivision of red-tile-roofed tract homes included firefighters, Department of Homeland Security officers and state prison guards.
After months of tailing Cuevas, the agents knew he favored Bud Light beer, burgers at Rally's and tacos at Jack in the Box.
They once pushed the cocaine-filled car of one of his drivers to a gasoline station after the man ran out of fuel on Interstate 5. The driver never suspected that the good Samaritans were helping so they could continue tailing him to his destination.
After midnight outside Cuevas' home, the agents started digging through his garbage cans. They were searching for a notepad, a receipt, a business card, anything with a phone number on it.
There was enough evidence to arrest Cuevas. But the goal was to expand the investigation, and that required resuming the phone surveillance. Agents hoped Cuevas had thrown away the numbers of some -- even one -- of the 30 new cellphones he had just distributed to his crew.
Sifting through trash was always a filthy chore, especially so in this case. Cuevas was the father of a newborn. The agents were elbow-deep in dirty diapers.
Finally, they pulled something from the muck. It was a piece of spiral notebook paper with numbers scrawled on it. Phone numbers.

BIDEN VISITS NARCOMEX TO ENCOURAGE MEXICO’S EXPORT OF
THEIR POOR, CRIMINALS AND ANCHOR BABY BREEDERS… THAT IS THE OBAMA-BIDEN VISION
OF THE NEW LA RAZA DEMOCRAT PARTY! THE PARTY OF MEX LOOTERS FUNDED BY CRIMINAL
WALL STREET BANKSTERS!

"They hauled them down to the
border," Sakuma said. "Three days later, they were standing in our
office, but they had a different name and a different Social Security
number."

They were here one day, gone the next. More than 1 million people have been deported since 2008 in one of the largest forced migrations in U.S. history. For many, the countries of their birth have never been and will never be home.

The Los Angeles Times followed some of these people beyond the border to find out what happened to them and their families.

SABOTAGE OF AMERICAN BORDERS WITH NARCOMEX, SABOTAGE OF E-VERIFY TO EASE MORE ILLEGALS INTO OUR JOBS, NON-EXISTENT ENFORCEMENT OF LAWS PROHIBITING THE EMPLOYMENT OF ILLEGALS, BILLIONS IN WELFARE HANDED TO LA RAZA ILLEGALS, BILLIONS OF TAX FRAUD RETURNSHANDED TO LA RAZA, SABOTAGE OF AMERICA’S VOTING TO EASE MORE ILLEGALS WITHOUT NON-FRAUD IDENTITY INTO OUR VOTING BOOTHS, TWO LA RAZA SUPREMACIST SEC. OF LABOR, AND ONLY ADVOCATES OF OPEN BORDERS INHOMELAND SECURITY and AMERICAN TAX DOLLARS USED TO FUND THE MEXICAN FASCIST PARTY of LA RAZA “THE RACE”…. Is Obama sabotaging American sovereignty as he hispanders for the illegals’ votes???

“There’s widespread doubt that this administrationcan be trusted to enforce our laws, and it’s goingto be difficult to move any immigration legislationuntil that changes,” Boehner said in a preparedstatement opening his weekly press conference.

BUILDING THE LA RAZA (unregistered dems) MEXICAN WELFARE STATE OFF OUR BACKS…

OBAMA’S ENDLESS SABOTAGE OF AMERICAN HOMELAND SECURITY, BORDERS AND LAWS FOR THE INVADING MEXICANS!

The Homeland Security Department has granted legal status to 99.2 percent of all illegal immigrants who have applied under President Obama's new non-deportation policy for young adults, according to the latest numbers released Friday.

While the Obama Administration halts deportations
to work on its secret amnesty plan, hospitals across the U.S. are getting stuck
with the exorbitant tab of medically treating illegal immigrants and some are finally
demanding compensation from the federal government

MEXICAN CONSULATES – HEADQUARTERS FOR THE
MEXICAN FASCIST PARTY of LA RAZA “THE RACE” INSTRUCTS CRIMINAL ILLEGALS ON
LOOTING AMERICANS… but then it’s by invitation of the DEMOCRAT PARTY!…. these same illegals already get our jobs!

“The watchdogs at Judicial Watch discovered documents that
reveal how the Obama administration's close coordination with the Mexican
government entices Mexicans to hop over the fence and on to the American dole.”
Washington Times

YOU WILL NOT HEAR OBAMA AND THE DEMS TALKING ABOUT THE STAGGERING MEXICAN CRIME TIDAL WAVE IN OUR BORDERS AS THEY PUSH TO LEGALIZE MEXICO'S LOOTING!ACCORDING TO CA ATTORNEY GEN KAMALA HARRIS, NEARLY HALF THE MURDERS IN CA ARE NOW BY MEXICAN GANGS.CA HAS THE LARGEST AND MOST EXPENSIVE PRISON IN THE NATION. HALF THE INMATES ARE MEXICANS.OF THE TOP 200 MOST WANTED CRIMINALS IN LA RAZA-OCCUPIED LOS ANGELES, MORE THAN 180 ARE ALWAYS MEXICANS. THE REST RUSSIAN AND ARMENIAN.LOS ANGELES IS THE MEX DRUG CARTELS GATEWAY TO THE AMERICAN WEST. THE MEX DRUG CARTELS NOW OPERATE IN MORE THAN 2,500 AMERICAN CITIES.VIVA LA RAZA SUPREMACY? THEN VOTE DEM TO PUT MORE ILLEGALS INTO OUR JOBS, WELFARE AND VOTING BOOTHS!

latimes.com/world/la-fg-mexico-post-chapo-20140225,0,1312988.story

latimes.com

MEXICO UNDER SIEGE

With 'El Chapo' gone, Mexicans brace for drug cartel turf war

Along with the fear of more violence, some worry about the economic fallout of the arrest of Joaquin Guzman, whose operation pumped billions into Sinaloa state.

By Richard Fausset and Tracy Wilkinson

7:38 PM PST, February 24, 2014

BADIRAGUATO, Mexico — Now that the Mexican government has nabbed the country's most-wanted drug lord, Fernando Antonio Robles is worried about the future.

Robles is a 16-year-old bricklayer's apprentice in the wild drug-producing municipality where Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman grew up. In this hardscrabble patch of mountainous Sinaloa state, more than 74% of the people live in poverty. And yet the tiny county seat is full of fine new, freshly painted houses.

Robles knows that many of them were built by El Chapo's men.

"A lot of people are going to be unemployed," Robles said while loitering with a friend on the handsome town square, "because a lot of people worked for him."

The arrest of Guzman on Saturday in the resort city of Mazatlan, a few hours' drive and a world away from Badiraguato, was greeted with delight by the Mexican government. President Enrique Peña Nieto is hoping to show the world that he can fight a better war on drugs by relying, as he said Monday, more on "the application of technology and information analysis" than the sheer military muscle deployed by his predecessor, Felipe Calderon.

But many Mexicans are less euphoric about the capture of Guzman. The drug business has long been a main driver of Sinaloa's economy. Here in the heart of El Chapo's worldwide empire, many see him as a sympathetic character whose operation pumped billions of dollars into the state.

"He's helped a lot of people," said Jesus Gonzalez, the caretaker of a famous chapel honoring Jesus Malverde, an unofficial "folk saint" for the poor — and for drug dealers. According to legend, Malverde, who died in the early 20th century, was, like Guzman, a bandit who spread his wealth around. Guzman "has given out a lot of money," said Gonzalez. "He's built many things."
The less controversial, but more widely held, opinion is that Guzman's fall could lead to bloody turf and succession battles while doing little to interrupt the broad market forces that define the worldwide drug market and Mexico's key role in it.

"The triumph of the Peña government in detaining El Chapo shouldn't be underestimated," Leo Zuckermann, a columnist for the Mexico City newspaper Excelsior, wrote Monday. "But the question that should interest us more is whether the arrest will help stop the violence in this country or not. I fear that the answer isn't promising. In fact, the opposite could happen — that is to say, that there will be an increase in homicides, kidnappings and extortion in the short run."

A power struggle may ensue within Guzman's Sinaloa cartel, especially if it is revealed that Ismael "El Mayo" Zambada, Guzman's top partner, gave him up — as some Mexicans suspect.

Such an internal war could disrupt the earning power of the men who commission those new houses in Badiraguato — and in the process hurt the economic prospects of workers like Robles.
But the Sinaloa cartel may also prove to be an exception to the rule. The largest of Mexico's drug cartels, it has long been considered one of the most sophisticated and well managed. Some close observers assume that Guzman and other leaders had worked out a succession plan as smooth as Apple's after the death of Steve Jobs. Guzman and Zambada worked together closely and are not likely to unleash their men against each other, these sources say.

The next generation is primed to pick up where El Chapo left off. Guzman's "childrenare poised to take over for him," said Ismael Bojorquez, editor of Culiacan's Riodoce newspaper who has studied the Sinaloa cartel extensively. Zambada and the other main Sinaloa cartel leader, Juan Jose Esparragoza, known as "El Azul," are firmly in control of their factions and do not need to seize Guzman's portion of the operation, Bojorquez said.

Peña Nieto's team expressed concern about the fragmentation of leaderless cartels soon after the new president took office in December 2012. Interior Minister Miguel Angel Osorio Chong said that the Calderon administration's "kingpin strategy" — focusing on the capture or slaying of the nation's top drug lords — resulted in smaller groups that were "more violent and much more dangerous," often branching out into extortion, kidnapping and robbery rackets.

Succession battles are also believed to have added to Mexico's recent violence. The killing of Arturo Beltran Leyva in Cuernavaca in December 2009, for instance, unleashed a bloody power struggle among his lieutenants.

Despite the new government's criticism of the strategy, however, few expected Peña Nieto to abandon it, particularly since that would mean rebuffing American security officials who often supply intelligence on the whereabouts of the capos. The United States' ability to track Guzman's satellite phone use was a key to his arrest.

The future of the cartel was the chief topic of debate Monday among residents of Culiacan, a city of 600,000 people.

The cartel's influence is all-pervasive here: A well-tended cross covered in balloons is displayed prominently in front of a busy shopping mall, commemorating the 2008 slaying of Guzman's son Edgar Guzman Lopez. The businesses in the mall are apparently too intimidated to argue with its presence. In the leafy town square, conversations with a stranger are often left to trail off when a speaker thinks a cartel spy might be nearby.

Taxi driver Jesus Luis Caldera, 36, predicted the cartel would weather the loss of Guzman. "It's going to be the same movie — only with different capos," said Caldera, who said he used to move cocaine for the cartel until he went to prison for it.

Armando Sanchez, 28, the manager of an electronics company from the state of Guanajuato, was playing curious tourist Sunday afternoon at the Malverde shrine. He worried that Guzman's death might give rival groups — particularly the bloodthirsty Zetas gang — a chance to muscle their way onto Sinaloa cartel territory.

"We're going to see a lot of fighting for control," he said.

Guzman may be locked away, but there is still anxiety that the vast machine that has protected him over the years remains intact. The Culiacan newspaper Noroeste reported Monday that it received threatening phone calls after it contacted Mazatlan's government offices to inquire about reports that municipal police there had been protecting El Chapo.

Guzman's 13 years of life on the run had its share of hardships: Mexican officials said he avoided arrest last week at a house in Culiacan by escaping through a series of underground drainage canals.
But he was also apparently intent on creating a semblance of a normal life. On Monday, Osorio Chong said that Guzman was with his wife, a former beauty queen named Emma Coronel, and the couple's young twin girls, when he was arrested. Osorio Chong said that the wife and children were not detained because "they had absolutely nothing to do with respect to the actions of the criminal."
In the mountain town of Badiraguato — about 50 miles north of Culiacan along a two-lane road controlled by heavily armed police checking up on who might want to visit there — Joaquin Guzman is still the local boy made good. A store selling pirated CDs was stocked with music singing his praises.

"They want to see him dead, but they can't," one tune declared. "The cartel is big, it's blowing up / I'm proud of Chapo Guzman."

As word of Guzman's arrest spread, many locals didn't buy it at first, preferring to believe it was a complicated ruse on the part of the Americans, said Pedro Perez, 45, a worker at an ice cream store.
Others, like Culiacan resident Rodolfo Albertos, 58, see no conspiracy. When it comes to the drug trade, he said, the forces that will continue to shape it are as clear as day — whether "El Chapo" is around or not.

"This isn't going to stop," Albertos said. "Not so long as there are consumers. As long as there are consumers, there's going to be business."

According
to the report, the amount of heroin seized at the southern U.S. border
increased 232% between 2008 and 2012 — apparently the result of greater Mexican
heroin production and a growing incursion by Mexican traffickers into U.S.
markets. It notes that the U.S. is experiencing a “sizable increase” in the
number of new heroin users.

THE MEXICAN DRUG CARTELS ENDORSE BARACK OBAMA’S
SABOTAGE of HOMELAND SECURITY TO BUILD THE LA RAZA DEM PARTY BASE of VOTING
ILLEGALS, AND TO EASE EVEN MORE ILLEGALS INTO OUR JOBS TO KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED
and PROFITS HIGH FOR HIS WALL STREET DONORS.

MOST OF THE FORTUNE 500 ARE GENEROUS DONORS TO THE
MEXICAN FASCIST PARTY of LA RAZA “THE RACE” google it!

SABOTAGE OF AMERICAN BORDERS WITH
NARCOMEX, SABOTAGE OF E-VERIFY TO EASE MORE ILLEGALS INTO OUR JOBS,
NON-EXISTENT ENFORCEMENT OF LAWS PROHIBITING THE EMPLOYMENT OF ILLEGALS,
BILLIONS IN WELFARE HANDED TO LA RAZA ILLEGALS, BILLIONS OF TAX FRAUD RETURNSHANDED TO LA RAZA, SABOTAGE OF AMERICA’S
VOTING TO EASE MORE ILLEGALS WITHOUT NON-FRAUD IDENTITY INTO OUR VOTING BOOTHS,
TWO LA RAZA SUPREMACIST SEC. OF LABOR, AND ONLY ADVOCATES OF OPEN BORDERS
INHOMELAND SECURITY and AMERICAN TAX
DOLLARS USED TO FUND THE MEXICAN FASCIST PARTY of LA RAZA “THE RACE”…. Is Obama
sabotaging American sovereignty as he hispanders for the illegals’ votes???

“There’s
widespread doubt that this administrationcan be trusted to enforce our laws,
and it’s goingto be difficult to move any immigration legislationuntil that
changes,” Boehner said in a preparedstatement opening his weekly press
conference.

BUILDING THE LA RAZA (unregistered dems) MEXICAN WELFARE STATE OFF OUR
BACKS…

OBAMA’S ENDLESS SABOTAGE OF AMERICAN HOMELAND SECURITY, BORDERS AND LAWS
FOR THE INVADING MEXICANS!

The
Homeland Security Department has granted legal status to 99.2 percent of all
illegal immigrants who have applied under President Obama's new non-deportation
policy for young adults, according to the latest numbers released Friday.

across the border and into a vast U.S.

distribution web in Los Angeles, DEA agents

were watching and listening.

Never lose track of the load.
It was drilled into everybody who worked for Carlos “Charlie” Cuevas. His drivers, lookouts, stash house operators, dispatchers -- they all knew. When a shipment was on the move, a pair of eyes had to move with it. Cuevas had just sent a crew of seven men to the border crossing at Calexico, Calif. The load they were tracking was cocaine, concealed in a custom-made compartment inside a blue 2003 Honda Accord.
The car was still on the Mexican side in a 10-lane crush of vehicles inching toward the U.S. Customs and Border Protection inspection station. Amputee beggars worked the queue, along with men in broad-brimmed hats peddling trinkets, tamales and churros.
A lookout watching from a car in a nearby lane reported on the load's progress. Cuevas, juggling cellphones, demanded constant updates. If something went wrong, his boss in Sinaloa, Mexico, would want answers.
The Accord reached the line of inspection booths, and a lookout on the U.S. side picked up the surveillance. He was Roberto Daniel Lopez, an Iraq War veteran, standing near the “Welcome to Calexico” sign.
It was the usual plan: After clearing customs, the driver would head for Los Angeles, shadowed by a third lookout waiting in a car on South Imperial Avenue.
But on this hot summer evening, things were not going according to plan. Lopez called his supervisor to report a complication: The Accord was being directed to a secondary inspection area for a closer look. Drug-sniffing dogs were circling.
Cuevas rarely talked directly to his lookouts or drivers. But after being briefed by the supervisor, he made an exception. He called Lopez.
“What's happening?” he asked.
“The dogs are going crazy,” Lopez replied.Dots on a map
Cuevas worked for the Sinaloa cartel, Mexico's most powerful organized crime group. He was in the transportation side of the business. Drugs were brought from Sinaloa state to Mexicali, Mexico, in bus tires. Cuevas' job was to move the goods across the border and deliver them to distributors in the Los Angeles area, about 200 miles away.
The flow was unceasing, and he employed about 40 drivers, lookouts and coordinators to keep pace.
The canines circling the load car that evening in August 2006 were the least of his problems. Eight agents from a Drug Enforcement Administration task force had converged on the border. Not even U.S. customs inspectors knew they were there. The agents had been following Cuevas and tapping his phones for months.

The canines circling the load car that evening in August 2006 were the least of his problems.

Because he was a key link between U.S. and Mexican drug distributors, his phone chatter was an intelligence gusher. Each call exposed another contact, whose phone was then tapped as well. The new contacts called other associates, leading to more taps. Soon the agents had sketched a vast, connect-the-dots map of the distribution network.
Its branches spanned the U.S. and were believed to lead back to Mexico's drug-trafficking heartland, to Victor Emilio Cazares, said to be a top lieutenant of Joaquin “Chapo” Guzman, the most wanted trafficker in the world. From his mansion outside Culiacan, Cazares allegedly oversaw the network of smugglers, distributors, truckers, pilots and stash house operators.
Other DEA investigations had targeted Mexican cartels, but this one, dubbed Operation Imperial Emperor, was providing the most complete picture of how drugs moved from Sinaloa to U.S. streets.
DEA officials were in no hurry to wrap it up. In fact, they were holding off on arrests so they could continue to study the supply chain and identify new suspects.
Imperial Emperor would eventually result in hundreds of arrests, the seizure of tens of millions of dollars in drugs and money, and the indictment of Cazares.
It would also reveal a disheartening truth: The cartel's U.S. distribution system was bigger and more resilient than anyone had imagined, a spider web connecting dozens of cities, constantly regenerating and expanding.The guy next door
As a U.S. Marine in Fallouja, Iraq, Lopez had dodged mortar fire, navigated roads mined with explosives and received a commendation for leadership. Back home in El Centro, he couldn't even get work reading meters for the local irrigation district.
But Lopez, who had two children to support, knew another industry was always hiring.
One of the Sinaloa cartel's main pipelines runs through the antiquated U.S. port of entry at Calexico, a favorite of smugglers. The inspection station sits almost directly on the border, without the usual buffer zone of several hundred feet, so inspectors have difficulty examining cars in the approach lanes. Drug-sniffing dogs wilt in summer heat that can reach 115 degrees.
California's southeastern corner, a region of desert dunes and agricultural fields with the highest unemployment rate in the state, offered fertile ground for cartel recruiting.
Smugglers were your next-door neighbor, the guy ringing you up at Wal-Mart, the big tipper at Applebee's, the old friend at your high school reunion.
Lopez was friends with a man named Sergio Kaiser, who had married into his family. Kaiser said he owned a body shop, but his tastes seemed too flamboyant for that. He was building a house with a grand staircase modeled on the mansion in the movie “Scarface.”
In reality, Kaiser was Cuevas' top lieutenant, and he told Lopez he could help him with his money troubles. There were several possibilities.
For a night's work driving a load car from Mexicali to Los Angeles, a driver shared $5,000 with his recruiter and got to keep the car.
Another entry-level position was as a lookout. One kind of lookout followed the load car from the stash house in Mexicali to the border. Another stood watch at the port of entry and reported when the car had cleared customs. Yet another tailed the load car up the freeway to Los Angeles.
Lopez accepted Kaiser's offer. Being a lookout was harmless, he figured: Just stand there and watch a car cross the border. “[He] didn't say it involved drugs, but I knew,” Lopez said. “I thought, 'What's the big deal?'“

When you think of drug cartels, you think violence, guns, killing. This guy was nothing like that.”

Tricks of the trade
Cuevas owned a large tract home in Calexico and drove a late-model BMW 323. A gold chain dangled from his thick neck. Married with two children, he enjoyed the cliched perks of a smuggler's life. He went through several mistresses, treating them to breast-enhancement surgeries and trips to Disneyland and San Francisco.
He would ride his pricey sand rail in the Baja California dunes, and he always picked up the tab at restaurants or on wild weekends across the border in Mexicali.
At Emmanuel's barber shop, Cuevas would jump the line to get his “fade” haircut, then pay for everybody else's trim. He took care of friends' hospital bills and lent people money, no strings attached.
“When you think of drug cartels, you think violence, guns, killing,” Lopez said in an interview. “This guy was nothing like that.”
He didn't carry weapons or surround himself with enforcers. Constantly juggling phones and buying packaging materials from Costco, he seemed more stressed out than intimidating. Cuevas had a stutter, and it worsened when his boss Cazares called from Sinaloa. He took antacids to calm an anxious stomach.
To get drugs across the border, he deployed a fleet of SUVs and cars with custom-made hidden compartments. He favored Volkswagen Jettas and Chevrolet Avalanches. Both were manufactured in Mexico, and the DEA believes cartel operatives were able to study the designs to identify voids where drugs could be concealed.
Cuevas sent the cars to a mechanic in Compton who outfitted the compartments with elaborate trapdoors. The jobs took two weeks and the mechanic charged as much as $6,500, but it was worth it. Only a complicated series of actions could spring the doors open.
One front-bumper nook could be accessed only by connecting a jumper cable from the positive battery post to the front screw of a headlight. The jolt of electricity would cause the license plate to fall off, revealing the trapdoor.
Cuevas picked his drivers with great care, rejecting people with visible tattoos or serious criminal records and sending those he hired on dry runs to test their nerves. He kept the Calexico border crossing under constant watch, focusing on the mobile X-ray machine that could see inside vehicles. It was used sparingly, and the moment inspectors drove it away, his crew went to work.
Over the years, his cars consistently eluded detection.
“I was great at it. I had never lost a car in the border,” Cuevas said. “Dogs never hit it or nothing.”
In mid-2006, however, he seemed to lose his touch.
In June, authorities had followed one of his drivers to Cudahy, near Los Angeles, and seized 163 pounds of cocaine from a stash house.
A month later, police outside El Centro stopped his best driver, a hot dog vendor from Mexicali, and found $799,000 in a hidden compartment.
Cuevas had to make the cartel whole, either in cash or by working the debt off by supervising shipments without receiving his cut. Hundreds of pounds of cocaine, meanwhile, continued to pour in every week from Sinaloa, and he was under intense pressure to keep the goods moving.
Now, on this August evening, a customs inspector had pulled his load car, the Accord, into the secondary inspection area.
“Dude, I think your guy got busted,” Lopez told Cuevas over the phone. “They've got him in handcuffs.”
Behind the dashboard and in a rear-quarter panel of the Honda, inspectors found 99 pounds of cocaine. The driver was arrested. Everybody else scattered. Lopez drove home, unconcerned. He had spent only 15 minutes at the border crossing and never got near the drugs.
Cuevas ordered his crew to dump their cellphones, in case anyone had been listening in. At the DEA's bunker-like surveillance post in nearby Imperial, the wiretap chatter went silent.
DEA agents had not expected a bust and were not happy about it. The agents had planned to let the driver cross the border and then follow him to his Los Angeles connection. Now they would have to regroup.

Waiting in the dark
Two days later, the agents sat in a van down the street from Cuevas' two-story home in Calexico, waiting for the lights to dim. Cuevas' neighbors in the subdivision of red-tile-roofed tract homes included firefighters, Department of Homeland Security officers and state prison guards.
After months of tailing Cuevas, the agents knew he favored Bud Light beer, burgers at Rally's and tacos at Jack in the Box.
They once pushed the cocaine-filled car of one of his drivers to a gasoline station after the man ran out of fuel on Interstate 5. The driver never suspected that the good Samaritans were helping so they could continue tailing him to his destination.
After midnight outside Cuevas' home, the agents started digging through his garbage cans. They were searching for a notepad, a receipt, a business card, anything with a phone number on it.
There was enough evidence to arrest Cuevas. But the goal was to expand the investigation, and that required resuming the phone surveillance. Agents hoped Cuevas had thrown away the numbers of some -- even one -- of the 30 new cellphones he had just distributed to his crew.
Sifting through trash was always a filthy chore, especially so in this case. Cuevas was the father of a newborn. The agents were elbow-deep in dirty diapers.
Finally, they pulled something from the muck. It was a piece of spiral notebook paper with numbers scrawled on it. Phone numbers.